Nvidia 6600GT good and stable for HDTV?

[Diginerd]

Hi all,

I'm stuck in a quandry. I've just moved my Sage from a rather flakey PC with a 5200FX graphics card to the following:-

Athlon 3200+XP CPU
1GB PC3200 ram
1 x 40GB OS / System Drive
2 x 250GB 16MB cache, 7200 RPM configured as a RAID 0, with 64K blocks
2 x Hauppage PVR 250 cards
1 x SA4200HD cable box hooked up via firewire
BFG Nvidia 6600GT with 128MB Ram (AGP)
win xp sp2

I'm running vanilla sage (tried beta 3.0.7 and 2.2.8), with the (excellent I might add) spaceghost instructions, nvidia decoders, and no matter what I do HD playback blows. Jittery, unstable, sync probs the whole shooting match.

I've trolled through searches here and I see a disappointing nuber of issues when people are using a Nvidia 6x00 graphics card of some description

I bought the 6600 GT under the impression that it could handle hardware decoding of HDTV. Has anyone had true, continued success with this card under Sage? If so what exact combination of settings / decoders are you using?

I have a window to return the graphics card, and I'm not adverse to swapping to something else assuming that that will pull my WAF out of the crapper.. :-(

Would a Radeon 9800 help?

Thanks for reading, open to all suggestions.

[h8dk97]

I'm using xcard for sdtv but as far as I know it can handle htdv, others may confirm. It's much cheaper as well. I tried to use R9600XT and wasn't happy with pq at all, but that was for sdtv.

[RedR]

Heya,

The 6600 is a nice card, though for HD? Might be a bit much for it with VMR9. How are you viewing the HD content? I run one on my main box and am quite happy with it. Haven't done anything HD yet but recording's, DVD's, and the sort plays back without issue for me. The 7800 is the way to go when it comes to HD from what I've read. As to considering the 9800, I'd say the 6600 is a better bet.

Hope that helps,
RedR

[mlbdude]

Stay away from an XCard for HDTV. VMR9 is not going to be as fast on the 6600 than even a 9600 so make sure you are running in Exclusive FUll Screen mode. Otherwise at 1080i the 6600 will choke. Otherwise you may just be experienceing some beta bugs.

[Diginerd]

Full screen exclusive frequently creates graphics glitches in the UI (Weird bars between and over characters).. Going to get around to filing a bug with screenies..

Interesting though that no one has chimed in and said it works flawlessly for them.. I'll give it a couple of days and then if I get no love I think it will go back to the store...

[blade]

I don't think the 6600 will be any good for HDTV and VMR9 until Sage gets all the bugs worked out of FSE mode. Even then they'd have to get it working with DX9.0b or somehow get around the FF/REW bug in DX9.0c before I'd consider it a working solution.

Have you tried overlay?

[Diginerd]

Heyas,

Overlay sort of works, or at least is less worse. I have to say I'm pretty disappointed with the overall performance of this card for PVR display compared to my old 5200FX. That card seamed to be just about as good as the 660 when it comes to HDTV.

I may be doing something wrong though as my CPU seams awful high when decoding HiDEF signals.

I'll post a separate more general thread about this..